A few weeks ago, I popped along to the latest Tenga Talk and saw Anouszka Tate, who chats all things sex and relationships on the “Project Pleasure” podcast, on the panel.
After a fabulous evening, and lots of interesting issues raised and questions answered, I thought, “I recognise Anouszka” and it was only after that I realised it was because we had attended the same high school – and she was a few years older than me. I thought it would be brilliant to get an interview with her.
Luckily for me, after getting in touch, Anouszka kindly agreed to talk to Never Settle, answering all my most curious questions, so we can all get to know Project Pleasure a little better…
1. You are one half of the dynamic duo behind fantastic podcast Project Pleasure, with your co-host, Frankie. Can you tell people who haven’t heard your podcast a little bit about it?
Project Pleasure is a podcast that puts the pleasure back into safe sex and healthy relationships, teaching you everything you should have been – but probably weren’t – taught at school!
On each episode we tackle a subject that should be on the curriculum, like porn, masturbation, contraception, or sexuality. We start the show by sharing our own thoughts or experiences (which generally ends in us crying with laughter cringing at each other’s pursuits of pleasure – there’s nothing we haven’t unashamedly admitted to at this point!)
Then the main bulk of the show is made up of chats with experts to make sure we get all the important facts and figures, and hearing moving, hilarious, or thought-provoking real life stories. That’s the most important part for me; I’m a big believer in changing minds by changing hearts, and hearing just one person’s story about how something has affected them can do that.
2. I think it’s brilliant that you cover a huge range of important topics which ordinarily wouldn’t be spoken about – did it you plan it all out or did it come together naturally as the podcast continued?
I’m an organisational queen, so yes, everything was definitely carefully planned out! Having said that, although we knew broadly what we wanted each episode to focus on, once we started researching each show – reading articles and chatting to potential guests – we always discovered little gems that suddenly made us think ‘wow, we really need to talk about this because this is the first time I’ve even heard about that’. After all, that’s what we’re aiming to do – platform stories and conversations that aren’t being had anywhere else.
For example, on our contraception episode we realised we needed to have a really well researched conversation about how the pill might be affecting mental health. One of our STI episode guests has HIV, and he told us there’s now medication that means we could realistically stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime – we hadn’t heard that in such explicit terms before.
And in researching our orgasms episode we discovered that when masturbating or engaging in lesbian sex, 95% of women easily reach orgasm within four minutes …so could it be that we value penetrative sex – the act most likely to get a man off – more highly than we do external clitoral stimulation…? That’s something we definitely need to talk about!
3. What made you want to start such a podcast, did something inspire you to start talking about these issues on a national scale?
So I did a degree in the history of sex and sexuality. I learnt so much in those three years that made me think that if more people knew these things, if we all understood each other better, the world would be a much kinder, more compassionate place.
Fast forward a couple of years and Frankie and I met producing the sex and relationships show on a national radio station. Every Saturday evening we would talk to listeners calling in with dilemmas and questions that were often so basic. How had people in their 30s, 50s, 70s got through life without knowing these things? At the same time we were seeing a consent crisis at universities, we were hearing about young girls missing school because their periods are too taboo to talk about, we listened as our male friends told us sex was ‘good’ if they had an orgasm, whilst our female friends deemed sex a success as long as there was an absence of pain.
We momentarily wondered why we should be the ones to lend our voices to sex education in the UK. We very quickly realised it’s as simple as ‘because we feel comfortable talking about this stuff’. We’ve learnt that that’s extremely rare, so with that privilege comes a sense of duty to make others feel as safe as we do. There’s great power in hearing the experiences of others and thereby feeling a little more ‘normal’, and a little less alone.
4. Very exciting that series 2 is due to air in the new year, how do you think you’ll expand the show, where do you want to take it?
We’re so excited for series 2! Where series 1 was our curriculum overview module, series 2 is going to be like your further reading…
We’ve called it Project Pleasure: Shaping Your Sexual Self. It’s about exploring the experiences, emotions, interactions and prescribed ideals that have shaped how you feel about your place both in the bedroom and in the wider world. How do body image, race, religion, schooling, gender, illness, parents, the media, societal expectations, …anything you can think of, intersect with your sexuality? What has influenced and shaped your sexual self?
…as for the future? We recently held our first live event – a sex ed pub quiz – which was hilarious fun, so we’ll definitely be planning more events like that to make sure we’re all having these conversations in real life too!
We’ll be back with series two in the autumn! In the meantime series one is available to listen back to whenever the mood takes you…
— Project Pleasure (@Pro_Pleasure) September 13, 2018
Sex education🤓
Consent👭
Periods❣️
Sexuality 🌈
Masturbation🍒
Contraception👶🏽
Body parts👀
Porn🍆
STIs 🔥
Orgasms💦https://t.co/LeBbIRHvT2
5. What is, or has been your favourite topic to talk about on the podcast?
I love talking about masturbation – Frankie and I get super detailed talking about techniques and toys and different types of orgasm! Both of us have talked about how we grew up doing it but not knowing if it was something any other woman in the world even knew about because it was so hush hush…so I think we’re both making up for lost time talking about it a lot now!
6. We both went to the same all-girls secondary school (such a small world!!!) but what in particular would you change if you could go back there and put together a curriculum?
For hundreds of years sex ed has always been about damage limitation – how not to get pregnant, how not to get an STI, how not to lose your honour (whatever the hell that means!). We need to put pleasure back on the curriculum, especially for girls. We get taught about painful periods and unwanted pregnancy while boys get fun things like masturbation and ejaculation. Sex is for everyone and – big shock – people do it for reasons other than making babies!
7. You’ve recently been on the panel for TENGA Talks (and were fab!), which discussed issues around masturbation and the way it’s perceived, would you be looking to do more of this type of talk in the future?
For sure! My biggest mission is to get people thinking about the language we use to talk about sex and bodies, and that can only be done if we all talk about sex out loud more!
It can seem like a small detail but, for example, when we call oral and manual sex ‘foreplay’ we’re relegating the kind of sex that’s most likely to get a woman off (clitoral stimulation) to a warm up act before the ‘main event’ that’s most likely to get a man off (penetration). We need to stop saying ‘vagina’ when we mean ‘vulva’. By misnaming our own anatomy we’re erasing all the parts that have the potential to bring us most pleasure – the clitoris, the labia, the perineum. We need more realistic language to talk about our sexual encounters; at the moment it’s always about power dynamics and conquest rather than mutual pleasure.
8. Finally, if there is one thing you want my readers to come away remembering about Project Pleasure, what would it be?
That sex is whatever you want it to be. Don’t feel like you have to follow the heteronormative sexual script that’s so pervasive in our society. Masturbation, oral, manual, penetrative, anal sex – indeed, no sex at all – are all legitimate ways to have sex. There’s no hierarchy of sexual acts or type of people. You have the right to derive pleasure from any part of your body and it doesn’t mean anything about who you are or your place in the world.
You can listen to the entire first series of Project Pleasure here
Follow Project Pleasure on Twitter @pro_pleasure
